


Hope in Heartbreak

by Miss_Peletier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Driving Lessons, F/M, and end with two dorks needing to be rescued, driving lessons that go badly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 05:25:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10915227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Peletier/pseuds/Miss_Peletier





	Hope in Heartbreak

“So, Kane had a pretty hard time letting you go this morning.”

Raven smirked at Abby, glancing over at her from the drivers’ seat of the rover. They’d been driving for a while – longer than ten minutes, for sure – and the whole time, Abby had said little more than a word. She clutched the sides of the seat with white knuckles, as though she expected the ground to drop from underneath them at any moment.

Driving, Raven realized, didn’t agree with her. She and Sinclair had decided that essential personnel – guard members and the Chancellor – should know how to drive the rover in case of an emergency.

It was always fun to see how she’d react when Kane was brought into conversation, and, more importantly, she had to get Abby’s mind off of the Rover before she passed the fuck out in the passenger seat.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Abby said, pointedly ignoring Raven’s stare. For as shaky as the rest of her body was, her voice remained steady.

Raven snorted. “Yeah, you do.”

It was impossible for her to have forgotten – in fact, no one around them at 0800 this morning would soon erase it from their memory. After all, Kane hadn’t exactly been subtle.

Raven would readily admit her interest in Marcus Kane and Abby Griffin’s relationship – whatever the hell it was – was equal parts selfless and self-serving. If she managed to get concrete proof that they were, as Monty so eloquently put it, “ _doing it_ ,” he’d give her the iPod he’d found on one of the Mount Weather runs.

That was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up, and naturally, she’d accepted. But believing there was more to their relationship than met the eye and actually proving it were, as she found out, two very different things. And most of the things she’d seen so far – pointed looks at each other on security cameras, sitting close to each other in the common area – could be explained away as deep friendship. Unfortunately for her.

And equally unfortunate for Raven, Abby seemed to have nothing to say on the subject at hand.

“Marcus and I are good friends,” she said quickly, swallowing hard.

“Abby, he stared at the rover until we were out of sight,” Raven said, thinking about how many songs she could fit on that music player. She’d had one on the Ark, a tiny little tarnished thing that she’d messed with until it could hold thousands of songs: unfortunately, it hadn’t survived the trip to Earth. It would be nice, she thought, to listen to her music again – provided it was saved somewhere on the backlog of Ark system storage.

“He knew I didn’t want to do this,” Abby said, turning to give Raven a glare that fell halfway between completely terrified and annoyed. “I don’t see why I need to learn to drive, Raven. If the entire guard knows, I could find one of them in an emergency.”

Raven rolled her eyes. It was a difficult thing to imagine, Abby Griffin being afraid. Sitting next to her was a woman who’d endured so much – the challenges of the Chancellorship, the drills at Mount Weather, and, more recently, Clarke’s departure. These were things that would have left lesser women unable to get out of bed in the morning: to Abby Griffin they stung, but weren’t enough to incapacitate her. Her heart broke, but it didn’t shatter. As obnoxious as weekly checkups on her leg were, Raven had to appreciate that.

That determined, steely woman seemed to have taken a vacation today. The version of Abby that sat next to her looked a little green, a little pale, and more than a little afraid.

Apparently, all it took to break Abby was four wheels and some gasoline.

 

***

 

“Shit,” Raven breathed, stealing a quick glance at Abby. All her temporary comfort had evaporated, torn away, revealing the terror unmasked beneath. Raven couldn’t exactly blame her: night was falling fast, and they found themselves stuck in the middle of the woods with no way home.

The rover had just – there was no better way to explain it – fucking _given up_ in the middle of the forest. They’d gotten about halfway home when the car’s lights went out, and the gas stopped working, and before they knew it…they sputtered to a stop. Raven, as a mechanic, had taken this in stride.

Abby, not so much.

“Raven, how bad is it?” she breathed, her words coming out a in a soft groan. At this moment, she knew all of Abby’s nightmares were proving themselves true. She hadn’t wanted to learn to drive in the first place, and now they were stuck in the heart of fucking nowhere without so much as a headlight to illuminate the darkness pressing in on them. There wasn’t much to fear from the Grounders – not in Trikru territory – but Grounders weren’t the only things inhabiting these woods. _Goddamn it._

“It’s…” Raven paused, debating whether or not to tell Abby the truth. On one hand…telling her about the dead battery would only freak her out, and telling her it would take more than an hour to fix it might give her a panic attack. On the other, if they were going to get out of here, she’d need some help with holding flashlights and giving her tools. There was no way they’d get out of this unscathed if Abby didn’t know what the fuck was happening. “It’s not great. But I can fix it.”

Even through the tint of the windshield, Raven saw Abby go even paler. “What happened?”

“It’s the battery,” Raven said. “It just died. I don’t know if someone left the headlights on or what, but when I get back…” she clenched her teeth, thinking of the hell she’d unleash when she found the reservation sheets for this rover. God help whoever was to blame for this.

“And you can fix that? We don’t have to replace it?”

“I don’t think so,” Raven said. “I’m going to have to generate a charge to jump it, though. Pretty easy, if I have the right stuff to do the job.”

Abby scowled. “And what do you need?”

“Right now? I need to know if there’s a jumper kit in the back of the car.”

Raven neglected to mention that typically, this was a job that fell to two cars – not one car and a prayer that there was a pack in the trunk that could help jumpstart the failed battery. God, if someone hadn’t remembered to put it back there or charge it…Raven’s shit list would just get longer. And she had a feeling Abby wouldn’t go easy on the culprits, either.

“Should I radio Marcus?” Abby asked, just far enough out of range for Raven to think she’d only heard what her slightly-panicked brain wanted her to hear. Sure, they were stuck in bumfuck nowhere with only trees for company, but if there was even the slightest chance she could get that music player…that would make her situation at least a little less shitty.

“What?” Raven asked, bit her lower lip, and waited.

“I said, should I radio Marcus? He might be able to help. And it’s getting dark, Raven. I don’t want to be out here for much longer.”

_Should I radio Marcus. GOD._

Right here, this…this was a potential golden opportunity. A guaranteed win. It had all the right pieces in place for a solution to her puzzle: a potentially life-threatening scenario, a “private” talk over radios. Kane would be pissed at her for taking Abby out here without checking the battery power first, but all things considered, she’d take a little lecturing from Kane any day if it meant that music player was waiting for her at the end.

Raven opened the trunk, sifting through messes of hand-drawn maps and printouts from databases. The front seat was clean, but the trunk was a fucking mess. She just needed to find that tiny plastic container, then their asses were saved.

Or…who said it needed to be here at all, even if it was?

“Yeah, I think you’d better radio him,” Raven said, ignoring the tiny twinge of guilt by pairing the pang with lyrics to her favorite song – a tune she’d soon be able to listen to. “I can’t find the jumper kit. Someone must have taken it out.”

“Okay,” Abby said, a waver in her voice that made Raven’s stomach lurch. It hadn’t taken them too long to get out here – twenty minutes at most – so it shouldn’t take any longer for Kane to find them, right? She and Abby would be okay.

“I’m gonna stay out here and keep looking under the hood,” Raven announced, half-gleeful, half-guilty. If it turned out Kane couldn’t get to them and she wasn’t able to discern anything from their conversation, she could always go back to the trunk and say she missed the pack the first time.

Abby nodded, and Raven moved into earshot of their conversation. She flicked on the recording device on her radio - an addition she'd made herself, just for moments like this - and waited. Victory, she thought, would taste so damn sweet.

“Marcus?” Abby started, a tiny quiver in her voice making it apparent she wasn’t okay. Internally, Raven cheered.

“Abby,” Marcus said, her name tumbling out as a relieved exhale. “You’re all right. I was worried.”

 _I was worried._ Could they be any more married? Smirking, Raven thought about how Kane’s fretting about their Chancellor probably affected his guard duties. When she got back, she’d have to ask Bellamy if Kane had been distracted for the past hour or two.

“I’m all right, but…there’s been a problem,” Abby said, and Raven, realizing she hadn’t even attempted to act as though she’d been working on the car, started unplugging and plugging in wires with a frenzied fervor. She could barely see Abby through the windshield, but she didn’t want to take any risks.

“What’s wrong?” Kane asked, and Raven knew it would be impossible to imagine the sudden tightness in his tone – distance distortion could only account for so much. God, how she wished Jasper were hearing this right now.

“The battery died,” Abby said, “and we don’t have a backup. Raven’s trying to fix it, but we’re not sure if we can get it working without another-”

“I’m on my way,” Kane interjected, apparently so eager to reach them – or one of them, specifically – that he couldn’t wait to hear the end of her sentence. “Please tell me you went to the place Sinclair took me.”

At that, Raven raised her eyebrows. Not at the statement itself, it was likely enough that Sinclair had indeed taken Kane to learn sometime earlier this week, but that this was apparently the subject of a discussion between the Chancellor and the head of the guard. Was there any detail of their lives that was off-limits between them?

“That’s where we are,” Abby said, sounding relieved. “I thought I’d keep the other one between us.”

Raven bent over, as if to pick up a tool from the ground, and gave a silent yell of victory.

 _Between us_ was pretty non-ambiguously romantic.

Holy _fuck_. When had they done anything together involving the cars? Abby hated them so much…how the hell would Kane have convinced her to go anywhere near one? And more importantly, had they done it in one of the rovers back at Arkadia, vehicles their people drove every day, and no one was the wiser?

_Holy._

_Fuck._

“That’s probably a good idea,” Kane said, the radio crackling a bit as the sound of a car door slamming came through. Was it her imagination, or did he sound a little embarrassed? “I wouldn’t…tell anyone else.”

“Right,” Abby said, and Raven didn’t have to be able to see her to know her cheeks were burning bright red. She could hear her favorite song now, blaring over those _awesome_ headphones. Once she messed with them a little, they’d be even better than anything she’d had on the Ark.

“Right,” Kane replied.

They were both quiet for a little while, the air around the rover laced with, as Raven would come to call it, “ _sexual awkward_.” After the tension apparently became too much, Abby spoke again.

“Do you think we should tell them you took me out there? Marcus, what if the dead battery was _our_ fault?”

Raven couldn’t help but think that Kane sounded a little indignant. “I’m head of the guard, and you’re the Chancellor,” he said, his tone gradually evolving from defensiveness to something softer, something gentle, something upon which Raven almost found herself embarrassed to intrude.

“If you want me to talk to Sinclair, I will,” Marcus continued. “But I thought you could use a little time to relax, Abby. And I remembered you said you heard Octavia talking about the butterflies...”

A smile sounded in Abby’s reply. “They were so beautiful. I can’t believe you figured out where they were.”

“That was nothing,” Kane insisted, although Raven had her doubts. It was a little too easy for her to imagine Kane, the man who gave Abby Griffin puppy stares she’d thought were only employable by teenage boys, spending days trying to track the whereabouts of the glowing blue butterflies that Octavia loved talking about to anyone who would listen. “I found them on one of our missions.”

Abby was quiet, and Raven’s heart sank. Not only because any romantic context was likely now expelled, but because she knew how awful Abby felt about Clarke leaving. More often than not they were the only two awake in the darkest hours of the morning – Raven because her leg wouldn’t let her sleep, and Abby, if the muted sobs bleeding through from beneath her door were any indication, because her daughter was out here alone in the woods somewhere and left without saying so much as a goodbye.

Kane seemed to notice her silence. “I’m sorry, Abby,” he said. “I didn’t mean to-”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “I just…I can’t…thank you for everything you’re doing, Marcus. For her and for me. I have to find a way to make it up to you.”

Well, there went her theory about them fucking each other senseless in the back of the rover. Apparently, there were limits on her luck tonight.

“No, you don’t,” Kane said, his voice warm against the rapidly cooling night air. “Abby, I…”

The rest of his sentence was lost to static, and Raven, caught in a rush of emotion, pounded her fist against the busted battery. What the hell had he been about to say? Could she have been a witness to a fucking declaration of love?

Raven hoped Abby would ask him to repeat himself – after all, if she had half the feelings for him that all of Arkadia assumed she did, she’d at least be curious enough to want to know where that phrase was going – and thankfully, she didn’t disappoint.

“Marcus, are you there?” she asked, her voice tight. At first, only a rush of static came through. A few moments later, they heard his voice again.

“I’m here,” he said, and Raven could imagine Abby’s shoulders slumping with relief. “Guess I lost reception for a little while.”

Her voice still a little _off_ , Abby asked the fateful question.

“What were you saying? Before the connection broke?”

Kane didn’t answer for at least ten seconds: long enough for Raven to worry he’d lost reception again. _Come on,_ she thought, almost allowing a groan of frustration to slip past her pursed lips.

“I was saying I’d like to do it again sometime,” he said, at long fucking last. “If you’d like that.”

His voice was low and tentative enough to make Raven Reyes question everything she thought she knew about the head of the guard. With his officers, at least according to Bellamy, Kane was the epitome of confidence. He knew what he was doing, after his years of service on the Ark, and he wasn’t afraid to pass that knowledge – and his concrete conviction in it – on to his younger guardsmen. But now, with Abby…this was a different side to Kane. This wasn’t the man who spent hours instructing his men on how to fire a gun; this was the man she’d seen holding Abby’s hand on the way back from Mount Weather, the man with something warm sparking in his gaze as he stared down at her on the cot.

She’d looked at Wick, then, and thought she’d seen the same thing. As it turned out, those gazes had been very, very different and meant very, very different things, she thought bitterly.

Abby’s voice was soft, but in a different way – where Kane emitted gentle nerves, Abby radiated muted elation.

“Yes,” she said, “I’d love to. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed tonight, actually.”

Kane sounded shocked, and Raven’s jaw dropped.

“Tonight?” he said. “Abby, it’s-”

“I know what time it is,” she said, talking fast, as if she feared he might barge in if she left space between her words. “But Marcus, I…I need a little hope right now.”

Again, more intensely, that feeling of intruding echoed from her brain, where the thought of eavesdropping was born, down to her clenching stomach. This was something strange and foreign to Raven, this kind of odd, unspoken devotion, especially between adults. After all, it wasn’t as if she’d been privy to it with her own parents.

Sure, she’d seen married couples on the Ark, assumed they were as happy as her mom was continually pissed off and determined to ignore Raven’s existence. But knowing there were people who were happy and having those two people be two adults you actively gave shits about…that didn’t feel quite so hollow in her chest. That didn’t make her heart scream with envy, make her grind her teeth and turn away for no reason she could fully understand.

This…this was something that made Raven smile, if only to realize the extent of their idiocy (and Kane’s completely all-consuming puppy love. Dear _God_ ). But if two people deserved this – whatever the hell it was – it was Kane and Abby.

“We can talk about it when I get there,” Kane said, and Raven found herself grinning for reasons that had nothing to do with her certainty in obtaining a new iPod.

She jumped as she heard branches snapping in the distance, turned her head and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw headlights. Kane, finally.

“Okay,” Abby said. “See you soon.”

Raven “worked” on the car for a little while longer, determined to make it appear as though she’d been doing something, smeared a little grease on her hands for good measure, then climbed back in the car and told Abby the bad news: they weren’t going to be able to fix the rover on their own.

“That’s all right,” Abby said, sounding like a completely different person than Raven had left in the rover only a half-hour earlier. “We have some hope now.”


End file.
